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IBM Travelstar password (I know, I know...)

I know that Iluvpu55y was asking something similar but our circumstances (at the very least) are very different. I bougfht a used Thinkpad from a girl who was selling it because she had broken the screen. She took out the memory and I took the thing apart (I paid $200- an investment in my education) and we were both happy. So now a few months later I have a new Dell Latitude C400 and I'm thinking I would like to use the old Thinkpad's hard drive as an extra drive so I pop it in and, yes, the password protection thing comes up. I don't know what the password is. I haven't even tried to boot from floppy or cd to format it yet (can I even do that?) and I would like to know if anybody has any idea how to get around the password. I would rather try to do that than format it right away because, frankly, I'm curious. Who could pass up 20 Gigs of stuff if there was a way not to? I read the manual, it seems pretty secure. I got the list of IBM bios default passwords, but those are for their computers, not components. Can anyone help? Oh, and the girl and I are no longer speaking.

I spoke to my contact at IBM and asked him if there was anyway around the hard disk password and he pointed me to this. I then asked him if that was company policy or if there was "really" a way in. He said that their service staff may have a trick but if they do they are not sharing it with him. Doesn't sound hopefull at all.

Note: Do not forget your hard disk password! Keep it in a safe place. If you forget your hard disk password, there is no way to reset your password or recover data in the hard disk drive. Neither an IBM authorized reseller nor IBM marketing
representative can make the hard disk drive usable.

*Removing a Hard Disk Password:
The procedure to remove a hard disk password depends on whether or not it is set to the same password as the power-on password